


so that we may learn to say 'i love you' and mean it

by Anonymous



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: M/M, Post-Break Up, a goodbye letter of sorts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:49:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26912434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: A letter written in the aftermath of a breakup.
Relationships: Miya Osamu/Suna Rintarou
Comments: 4
Kudos: 29
Collections: Anonymous





	so that we may learn to say 'i love you' and mean it

**Author's Note:**

> written for (to) someone who will never read this. i hope you're doing well, because that's all i can hope for.
> 
> [osamu's pov here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27488410)

Dear Osamu,

Nowadays when I think of you, I think of a time when we were both 17-year-old boys who didn’t know how to say ‘I love you’ and mean it. Somehow, the only way those three little words slipped off our tongue back then was when we were high off laughter and jokes. We stripped it bare of its meaning and hung it out to dry like a worn T-shirt with too many holes in it.

Naturally, we didn’t know the meaning of love back then. It wasn’t exactly a foreign concept; there were plenty of books and movies and poems all talking about love and what it was. We knew love in its most technical terms and that was the extent of it.

Our parents did not say it to us, either — those three little words. Instead, our mothers cut up some fruit and called us down to eat, and our fathers said ‘good job’ when we showed them our test scores. Perhaps, in this sense, it is not our fault that we did not know how to say ‘I love you’ and mean it. If our parents never taught it to us, how were we to learn? So we laughed at romance films and books, and called them wishy-washy and cringy and wastes of time.

As if that would sand-in the hole in our chest, make it into some shape that was easier to fill.

Nowadays when I think of you, I think of a time when we were both 17-year-old boys in the same class. The English teacher brought up love as a topic one day. The girls said that love is something you feel rather than know, and that everything will fall into place and just _click_ when the time comes. The boys merely laughed.

Later that afternoon, at lunch, you told me that love was the way your mother never forgets to pack lunch for the both of you. You told me that love was waiting for the other person even when they haven’t asked you to. You told me that love was remembering the other person’s favourite foods and buying it for them.

I thought about it for a while. I hadn’t thought about it much up until that point, but the revelation cradled my mind and heart gently, and I didn’t feel scared at all when I told you—

That love was a boy with a bad dye job and a pair of grey eyes shining with silent mirth. That love was a boy who’s a little too obsessed with food, who waits for me to finish packing my bag after class. That love was a boy who buys me my first chuupet of the summer in the flavour I like best, which I have only ever mentioned once.

I did not know love up until that point, but I was surer of this than anything else.

That love was a boy who never leaves me behind, who walks beside me and matches my stride and pace, who bumps me in the shoulder playfully when my thoughts start straying.

Nowadays when I think of you, I think of that afternoon on the school rooftop, our lunch boxes on the side, forgotten. And the sunlight in your hair as you ran a hand through mine and pulled me closer, so that our galaxies might collide and we could witness the birth of a supernova together.

For that one afternoon, we’d forgotten about the rest of the world and lost ourselves learning each other’s. For that one afternoon, there was no past and there was no future; there was only you and me and a moment so golden I wanted to cut it out of time and live in it for eternity.

Time is cruel, don’t you think? Far too soon, we had to say goodbye to each other at the airport. My luggage was measly and I couldn’t stop thinking about how I’d wanted to fit more of you in there to take with me. You held me in your embrace for a while. I think you knew what I couldn’t bring myself to say, in the end.

We’d done the research and the calculations. I knew the exact number of kilometres between our two universities and the time and money it’d take to reach you. We promised to call often and to text even more frequently. 

Yet, the distance still hit us like a trainwreck.

Maybe it’s pathetic of me to sit here writing a letter to you in the aftermath of a breakup— no, it _is_ pathetic of me to do so. And yet, even if I acknowledge this, still I—

  
  
  


Nowadays when I think of you, I think of the hoodie you left at my place the last time you visited, which I haven’t quite been able to bring myself to so much as look at, much less touch. I think of the list we made together during the last week of high school, of all the things we’d do together in the future, and I think of how there are 24 promises on that list and only 5 of them are checked off.

Most of all, I think of that little pocket in time and space I wanted to live in forever, and I wonder if you’d felt the same. 

That day, at the airport, if I had said ‘I love you’ and meant it, would you have said it back?

Would you have meant it?

I know we have said ‘I love you’ to each other countless times even after that day, but still I wonder and I can’t help thinking—

That if I had said ‘I love you’ that day, it would be one time more than the number of apologies we spilt into each other’s chest cavity. 

In the end, there’s nothing I can do about it. Not anymore. 

In the end, perhaps we never really learned how to say ‘I love you’ and mean it. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have something else to blame all this heartbreak on instead of ourselves?

In the end, as I write this letter and hope it never finds its way to you, I still think of you everywhere I go. That’s okay. My heart and mind will eventually learn to let you go, one day.

We met and we loved and we tried. That will have to be enough.

Rin

**Author's Note:**

> with due time, maybe a day will come where i will finally be able to throw away the bucket list we made, and erase from my GPS the address of the cemetery of promises we made too young.


End file.
